And that’s the point. We spend all our energy trying to convince folks of some particular point when in he grand scheme of things there is much room for agreement. Sure you R’s not perfect for anyone but it’s a start which is better than standing still arguing.

I have indeed come to the conclusion that the source of disagreement comes from a very lazy place where first you create an adversary who really isn't there and then proceed to pick them apart with arguments which really aren't relevant to the bigger picture of addressing those issues you pointed out.

More than anything this position allows you to conveniently seal yourself off from participating and engaging in the major crisis of our time. It demonstrates number 1 cowardice and number 2 indolence. All the more foolish when your defense is that your position is based on objective science while your adversaries are biased in their narrative. This position only lets you off the hook. Especially when you then proceed to deny the severity of the issues like climate change and other imbalances caused by human overshoot.

We are far too deep into the crisis to be involved in petty disputes.

I am sure picking blueberries puts this all into perspective.

Our resiliency resembles an invasive weed. We are the Kudzu Apeblog: http://blog.mounttotumas.com/website: http://www.mounttotumas.com

This is all part of tragedy of the commons. When it comes to resource usage, there is a notion of fairness. It's like during times of rationing, rationing is only effective when there is a sense of trust that nobody is dipping in and taking more than he/she deserves. Since there is no universal enforcement body to keep others from consuming, then it falls purely to conscience, and history shows that conscience is insufficient in keeping hands out of the proverbial cookie-jar.

HALL OF SHAME:-Short welched on a bet and should be shunned.-Frequent-flyers should not cry crocodile-tears over climate-change.

He and two colleagues report in the journal Nature Communications that they identified 386 prominent climate contrarians – mostly English-speaking academics, scientists, politicians and business people – and 386 distinguished climate scientists.

They then identified the 100 most prominent of each group in the 100 most prominent media outlets. Across the spectrum, the contrarians achieved the higher score, with more than 26,000 articles presenting their views, compared with17,530 presenting the science for climate change. When they zeroed in on 30 selected media outlets the score evened, but the difference was less than 1%.

“It’s well known now that a well-financed propaganda campaign on behalf of conservative fossil fuel interests led mainstream media to frame reporting on climate change science as political reporting rather than science reporting,” Professor Westerling said.

“Political reporting focuses its narrative around conflict and looks to highlight competing voices, rather than telling the story of the science.”

In the global study, scientists report in the journal Global Environmental Change that they examined the framing of media coverage in 37,000 articles in 45 countries on all inhabited continents between 2011 and 2015, to find that the deciding factor in perception was simple: the gross domestic product per capita, the economists’ favourite measure of wealth.

you must be joking, the only time you take the opportunity to read a published paper it is one that has been identified by a host of scientists as being something that should never have been published, includes poor research practice, defamation and breaches all the codes of ethics that Nature espouses?

Here is what Judith Curry (who has more peer reviewed publications and awards for her work in climate science than any of the vocal "warmists") said:

This ranks as the worst paper I have ever seen published in a reputable journal. The major methodological problems and dubious assumptions:.♣ Category error to sort into contrarians and climate scientists, with contrarians including scientists, journalists and politicians.♣ Apart from the category error, the two groups are incorrectly specified, with some climate scientists incorrectly designated as contrarians.♣ Cherry picking the citation data of top 386 cited scientists to delete Curry, Pielke Jr, Tol, among others (p 12 of Supplemental Information)♣ Acceptance of the partisan, activist, non-scientist group DeSmog as a legitimate basis for categorizing scientists as ‘contrarian’♣ Assumption that scientific expertise on the causes of climate change relates directly to the number of scientific citations.♣ Assumption that it would be beneficial for the public debate on climate change for the ‘unheard’ but highly cited climate scientists to enter into the media fray.♣ Assumption that scientists have special authority in policy debates on climate change

Apart from the rank stupidity of this article and the irresponsibility of Nature in publishing this, this paper does substantial harm to climate science.Climate science is a very broad and diffuse science, encompassing many subfields. Each of these subfields is associated with substantial uncertainties, and when you integrate all these fields and attempt to project into the future, there are massive uncertainties and unknowns. There are a spectrum of perspectives, especially at the knowledge frontiers. Trying to silence or delegitimize any of these voices is very bad for science.Scientists who are effective in the public communication of climate change can speak about topics beyond their own personal expertise. This requires a different set of skills from basic research: ability to synthesize and assess a broad body of research and communicate effectively. Scientists on the ‘contrarian’ list bring something further to the table: fact checking alarming statements; concerns about research integrity; thinking outside the box and pushing the knowledge frontier of climate science beyond AGW – issues that are important to the MSM and public communication of climate science.The harm that this paper does to climate science is an attempt to de-legitimize climate scientists (both academic and non academic), with the ancillary effects of making it more difficult to get their papers published in journals

Richard Tol who is well known for his research into the economic impacts of climate change and related policy stated:

How did this paper get published? The authors are trained as natural scientists and, moonlighting in the social sciences, may not have been aware of the rules that apply to working with human subjects. For two years, the authors worked with human subjects and never paused to wonder about the ethics or consult with a social scientist. You cannot just go around and identify someone with a "lack [of] scientific training" or as a member of a "political movement" -- not if you collected data to prove your point and certainly not, as seems to have happened here, without such data.

The editors did not stop them either, nor did the referees.

Susan Crockford a recognized published expert in the field of polar bear research said:

This obsession that scientists-with-a-message have about silencing peers with other viewpoints (rather than constructing and communicating a winning argument themselves) is vile and utterly counter to what real science is about. Not surprisingly, they positively fawn over media stars like Al Gore and Greta Thunberg who have no science background but willingly repeat the accepted message of climate-change-doom.

Richard Betts a well-known climate scientist Head of climate impacts section at Hadley Centre said in a tweet where he called on Nature to formally retract the article:

Also, I think (as I always have done) that simplistic, pejorative labelling ("deniers", "contrarians" or whatever) is distasteful, subjective and deeply unhelpful, especially when used in a scientific context like here. Where is the line drawn, and who gets to decide? Worrying

Pielke Sr has also called on Nature to retract the article given it is fundamentally flawed and defames a number of accredited scientists.

In the comments section to this paper at Nature the following were published:

An embarrassment for Nature

When did Nature become such a pure propaganda tool?

This publication is no more than a politically rooted appeal for de-platforming voices who do not sing with the the-end-is-near-choir, masqueraded as a scientific paper.

This sort of BS ends up doing a huge disservice to climate research in general. Supporting it shows an astounding amount of ignorance with regards to the subject matter or scientific research in general.

I’ve read up on Ms. Curry before, after other similar discussions. And what I found was that her opinions are not nearly so controversial as is made out.

For example:

Her philosophy, then and now, is that if climate scientists would more readily acknowledge the uncertainties inherent in the issue, skeptics would more likely accept the well-established central tenets of global warming.

To give one example, she says human activities are contributing to global warming, but she bridles at the IPCC consensus that humans are "largely responsible" — in other words, that more than 50 percent of global warming to date is caused by human activity.

"It might be around 50 percent or even a little less. I mean this is what we don't know" she says.

I have answered this question numerous times over the past decade here. Since the late forties the earth has indeed been warming but prior to that in the early part of the twentieth century it was warming at an equal rate only to be followed by cooling. Half of the warming in the twentieth century occurred prior to major industrialization in the fifties. This is a point that Curry makes continuously...nobody has explained the early warming properly in the context of man being primarily responsible. And the problem is that many here conflate "warming" with "dangerous warming". The two aren't the same and there is no evidence for the latter other than model-driven.

If so to what do you attribute the source?

man plays a role, I doubt it is at 50% but CO2 from man-made sources will have an impact on greenhouse total ppm. That being said there is a wide range of ECS published in the literature, everything from 1.5 C to 4.5 C for a doubling of CO2. More and more of the recent work is focussing on a much lower ECS in the range of 2 C. What that means is that warming outside of this range (if it occurs given the models infer higher ECS) has to have influences from parts of the climate system that are currently being studied in detail including the response of the Pacific to radiative forcing, ENSO/PDO or natural internal variability and even (as of late) the impact of ocean floor heating from spreading centres etc. Each of these may have very small impacts but together it could overwhelm the human impact. There is a good comment in a paper from sometime ago that talks about the issue:

The main conclusion drawn from the body of work reviewed in this paper is that distinguishing between natural and externally forced variations is a difficult problem that is nevertheless key to any assessment of decadal predictability and decadal prediction skill. Note that all the techniques are limited by some assumption intrinsic to their analysis, such as the spatial characteristics of the anthropo- genic signal, independence of noise from signal, or statistical stationarity.

.

I’ve read up on Ms. Curry before

maybe you should actually read what it is she writes rather than get your opinion from someone else?

asg70 wrote:This is all part of tragedy of the commons. When it comes to resource usage, there is a notion of fairness. It's like during times of rationing, rationing is only effective when there is a sense of trust that nobody is dipping in and taking more than he/she deserves. Since there is no universal enforcement body to keep others from consuming, then it falls purely to conscience, and history shows that conscience is insufficient in keeping hands out of the proverbial cookie-jar.

The tragedy of the commons is indeed what we have on a global scale and it explains the dynamics leading up to the maximum bloom of population increase and extraction. Actually, all the dirty politics and corporate lobbyists and disparity of wealth is actually a reflection of this. I look at it in the following way; there are actually two tragedy of the commons. The first one is the classic ecological one, the physical commons that we are exploiting to the point of imbalance; soils, air quality (climate change) , water, biodiversity etc. The 2nd commons that we are equally exploiting is the very trust of the public, the collapse of that sense of the common good. . Both the physical depletion and the "trust" depletion is what we are seeing unfolding in parallel.

This is leading us to a highly unstable state where the external environment starts sending us increasingly destabilizing feedbacks at exactly the same time when the distrust of the public in our institutions hits the maximum. This is not an environment where you can expect much hope in collective or personal sacrifice or "conscience" to resolve the crisis. Not to mention something like global climate change agreements to have the power to overrule this tragedy of the commons.

What we have though is the opening where the consequences themselves become the solution. Something I have mentioned here countless times.

Embrace the instabilities, the dynamics of the overshoot predator, embrace climate change, embrace even the further desperate shenanigans of those in power to maintain their privilege. Even embrace the way the vast majority of the public has become brain dead in feeding on the engineered tribal politics. The reason to embrace this at the end of the day is to fully reveal the dysfunction.

In other words as George Carlin said...... the shit is just too deep to fix it. We have taken this tragedy of the commons, both the physical and social commons, way beyond the fixing point. The consequences will now do the fixing. And that idealist that you find when you scratch the cynic? maybe down that road of consequences a ways that idealism will once again give rise in the collective to a sense of the common good. Where that sense of sacrifice sits on a bedrock of a commons not fragmented, cracked, broken exploited etc.

A lot of instabilities between here and there we will have to work through. EMBRACE IT. That is now the nature of the game.

Last edited by Ibon on Mon 02 Sep 2019, 08:09:34, edited 2 times in total.

Our resiliency resembles an invasive weed. We are the Kudzu Apeblog: http://blog.mounttotumas.com/website: http://www.mounttotumas.com

Newfie wrote:I’ve read up on Ms. Curry before, after other similar discussions. And what I found was that her opinions are not nearly so controversial as is made out.

For example:

Her philosophy, then and now, is that if climate scientists would more readily acknowledge the uncertainties inherent in the issue, skeptics would more likely accept the well-established central tenets of global warming.

To give one example, she says human activities are contributing to global warming, but she bridles at the IPCC consensus that humans are "largely responsible" — in other words, that more than 50 percent of global warming to date is caused by human activity.

"It might be around 50 percent or even a little less. I mean this is what we don't know" she says.

Curry is a denialist bimbo. I could care less about her cloud microphysics credentials (I do cite her papers in some of mine). She clearly has no clue what controls the energy budget of the ocean-atmosphere-land system. It is exactly trace greenhouse gases and not cloud or land snow/ice albedo. Since her one tool is clouds, every warming process must be cloud related. This 50% attribution is meaningless prattle since she never delineates what her calculations are and even then she is 100% using non-independent factors. So the 50% not human-driven is actually due to the 50% that is human-driven.

If she is claiming that solar variability and the associated GCR flux variation is driving the warming we have seen over the last 40 years, then she is a certifiable crank.

An example of the role of CO2 is the snowball Earth regimes seen hundreds of millions of years ago back when the Sun was less luminous. It was first the draw-down of CO2 into the oceans that facilitated the growth of a global ice sheet (except near the equator) with the albedo acting as a positive feedback, and then it was the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere from volcanism which could not be sequestered in the oceans that ultimately melted the ice sheet regardless of its albedo. The key variable driving the whole process was CO2.

You claim to be a climate scientist which given your language you are clearly not. Apparently you are not familiar at all with Curry’s views as she is 100% a believer in AGW (hence not a "denier"), but she is also made a point that the vast majority of published research is pointing toward a low range in ECS and TCS not a high one. Lets see she has about 150 peer-reviewed papers published on climate topics, has numerous awards from various climate research groups and you have what?

She clearly has no clue what controls the energy budget of the ocean-atmosphere-land system. It is exactly trace greenhouse gases and not cloud or land snow/ice albedo. Since her one tool is clouds, every warming process must be cloud related. This 50% attribution is meaningless prattle since she never delineates what her calculations are and even then she is 100% using non-independent factors. So the 50% not human-driven is actually due to the 50% that is human-driven.

I call BS on the claim you “cite her papers” as using the term “denialist bimbo” pretty much tells me you are as far from a credited scientist as can be. Such statements are sophomoric at best and have no place in scientific discourse. You either need to stop pretending to be a scientist or clean up your language.I’ve called BS on you a number of times on this exact same issue. You have claimed that no reputable scientist believes in natural variation yet when confronted with numerous recent published research that deals precisely with decadal natural variation in climate you go silent. And as to characterizing her as only having one tool “clouds” you actually need to really read some of her work given large scale ocean circulations (she specifically points to research looking at variations in PDO and AMO) are a big part of the uncertainty she points to and her one statement that says it all is that climate is a highly complex nonlinear dynamical system with no simple cause and effect, shifting naturally in often unexpected ways. The exact opposite of what you are claiming she believes. As to the 50:50 argument Curry has supported her arguments in a blog post a long time ago:https://judithcurry.com/2014/08/24/the-50-50-argument/rather than making things up about what she has claimed perhaps you should read her what she has actually said.

If she is claiming that solar variability and the associated GCR flux variation is driving the warming we have seen over the last 40 years, then she is a certifiable crank.

I thought you said you had read her work and cited it numerous times? If you did you would actually know what her claims were wouldn’t you?. Heres a hint, she has stated that the current understanding is that GCR doesn’t have a proven large enough impact on cloud cover but that research continues. Seems to me that a scientific approach is to have multiple working hypotheses, adjusting theories as more evidence and research is done. You apparently believe that the only relevant research is that which agrees with your theory…how scientific.

An example of the role of CO2 is the snowball Earth regimes seen hundreds of millions of years ago back when the Sun was less luminous. It was first the draw-down of CO2 into the oceans that facilitated the growth of a global ice sheet (except near the equator) with the albedo acting as a positive feedback, and then it was the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere from volcanism which could not be sequestered in the oceans that ultimately melted the ice sheet regardless of its albedo. The key variable driving the whole process was CO2.

Well you are certainly sure of what happened about 650 Mya. Unfortunately, the folks who have been researching the topic for the past quarter of a century are not.

Paul Hoffman the researcher who actually brought the theory of a Snowball Earth to the forefront (although he didn’t coin the phrase) and is without doubt the current expert on what the various views are, points to an origin that started with the breakup of supercontinent Rodinia and the concomitant increase of weathering of rocks which would have consumed CO2 (not ocean buffering) however the general belief is that the main trigger was a sequence of large volcanic eruptions which lofted sulfur aerosols into the stratosphere where they remained for a considerable period of time reflecting solar radiation and creating cooling. The coincidence of timing of eruptions with the two Snowball Earth events has led researchers to point to this as the main trigger. Paul pointed out in a recent interview that there is really no evidence to suggest another cause but research continues.

But Paul (who I know; I met him when I attended a couple of his conference presentations on the topic decades ago which resulted in a lot of audience arguents) admits it is all theory (whereas you seem to present a theory as fact) and points out that there are many researchers who disagree with him.

My point is stop with the proselytizing especially about subjects you know absolutely nothing about. Pretending that theories are proven fact is not a scientific approach, it might be something that impresses the fan club which seems to be your main goal.

Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of uncertainty, some of them unsure, some of them are nearly sure; but none is absolutely certain.